On the Definition of the Sacred

by Tim Maroney

At our present level of psychological understanding, we lack even
the basics for a definition of such a vague term as "spirituality",
except in terms of equally vague words such as "holy", "sacred", and
"numinous". These terms can only be defined in terms of each other,
so we have gained no real understanding or clarity with such
definitions. We are merely playing shuffleboard with syllables.
"Sacred" means "consecrated or holy"; "holy" means "divine or
sacred"; "numinous" means "divine"; "divine" means "spiritual".

At some point in the future, our understanding of psychology may
be such that we will be able to break these concepts down into
genuinely simpler concepts, such as the interrelationship of neural
clusters. But for now, they remain irreducible absolutes.

In the face of these circularities, many mystics fall back to the
position of no-definition, often expressed in terms of the inherent
inadequacy of language to capture the ultimate ground of reality. The
Tao that can be named is not the true Tao; katz! But the same is
equally true of the phenomena we typically consider mundane and
non-spiritual. No language can genuinely capture a single red rose,
or the sound of jackhammers at 7:30 on a Saturday morning. Language
is by nature a scaled-down model of reality which fails to partake of
the wholeness of the phenomenon it describes. There is no reason that
language should be any less useful in discussing the "numinous" than
it is in discussing the rose or the hammer.

The true problem in description of the spiritual is lack of a
vocabulary. "Red" as an experience can't really be defined any more
than "holy" can. It is just that we all know what the word "red"
refers to, having experienced the referent ourselves, and having
experienced the word in conjunction with its referent. Those who have
experienced sacredness recognize it, and they may be able to suggest
to each other a vocabulary for describing its particular
manifestations. Those who do not know spirit will see this vocabulary
as a meaningless jargon. But even those who know should be aware that
they are not explaining spirit with their vocabulary. They are merely
labelling it.

And yet, people persist in the silliest attempts to explain the
spirit with labels. We are bombarded by totally foolish "definitions"
such as "feelings out of the ordinary" (does this include the feeling
of being rear-ended by a purple Volkswagen?) and "other dimensions of
consciousness" (the term "dimension" is surpassed only by "evolution"
in its use as a meaningless buzz-word by the metaphysically
inclined). Non-definitions of this sort are in their way as good as
any other terminology, because those who have known the spirit will
recognize more or less what the speaker is talking about, but they
are no more basic - and a good deal more fuzzy-minded -
than "holy", "sacred", and the rest of the crew.

So let us take sacredness as an indefinable but recognizable
absolute, and starting from there try to develop a taxonomy of sacred
experiences. Immediately new problems arise. First, religions have
long worked to develop these terminologies themselves, yet no two
religions can agree on them. Second, being more or less familiar with
these religious systems, we may find it difficult to avoid invisible
but powerful assumptions built into them - or, more likely, we
will not even try, treating these basic assumptions as unquestioned
fact. Third, we may once again fall into nonsense of the "dimensions
of consciousness" or "feelings out of the ordinary" kind, imagining
that we are analyzing things into more basic concepts when we are
only spinning out absurdity.

Probably the most common error is to refer to "states of
consciousness". This terminology ignores the fact that there are as
many states of consciousness as there are moments in the lives of all
sentient beings. It's as if we are imagining the mind to be a car,
with first gear the "mundane consciousness", second gear the first
stages of "religious illumination", and so on. But the mind is far
more complex than a car; it does not have clearly distinct modes of
operation. Each of its "states" involves billions of variables. Not
only is one person's meditative trance not the same state as another
person's, it is not even the same state for the same person from
meditation to meditation, or from moment to moment in a single
session. We can speak of broad classes of similar experiences, but
not of states of consciousness.

"Red" is not a "state of vision"; it is one component of a visual
experience which has many other factors and which will never be
precisely duplicated in another experience. We do not see vision in
terms of "states", but in terms of highly complex, multidimensional
phenomena. Is the sacred simpler and more mechanical than the
visible?

"States of consciousness" is an example of all three kinds of
errors: using the terminology of a single school, not questioning the
assumptions underlying a terminology, and mistaking a meaningless
label for serious analysis.

Another common error is the confounding of classes. For instance,
we might divide spiritual experiences into the immanent and the
transcendent. The former sees the unity (or voidness) of all
phenomena; the latter sees all phenomena as transcended by some
spiritual force or being outside the mundane world. This is a perfect
valid measure of spiritual experiences, but it is not the only (or
even the primary) measure. Many experiences are more similar to
counterparts in the other class than they are to their classmates.
Some belong in both classes or neither.

There are any number of spiritual measures, among which are static
or dynamic, full or empty, harsh or soothing, personal or impersonal,
free or structured, spontaneous or deliberate, passionate or arid,
solitary or social, intellectual and emotional, differentiated and
uniform, and so forth. We do not impose any useful taxonomy by
putting one of these measurements above the others, dividing all
spiritual experiences into type 1 and type 2. A static, full, harsh,
impersonal, immanent experience is more like a static, full, harsh,
impersonal, transcendent experience than it is like a dynamic, empty,
soothing, personal immanent experience. But if we were committed to
making a basic division between immanent and transcendent
experiences, we would have to say that any immanent experience is
more like any other immanent experience than it is like any
transcendent experience.

In summary, no language is truly adequate to description of
spirituality, but some terminologies are less adequate than others.
Terminologies which claim to analyze but do not break notions down
into more basic notions are nonsense. Terminologies which impose an
oversimplified linear structure on the multidimensional nature of
spiritual experience are misleading. Terminologies based on
unexamined assumptions about the structure of the psyche and the
superiority of some experiences to others are worse than useless.